Tools, Services and Support of NASA Salinity Data at the PO.DAAC

The Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Center (PO.DAAC) serves as the official NASA repository and distribution node for all Aquarius/SAC-D data products in close collaboration with the project. We additionally distribute the JPL Aquarius-CAP dataset and are also the designated archive for the SPURS field campaign data. Here we report on the status of NASA salinity data holdings at PO.DAAC, the range of data services and access tools that we provide in support of the Aquarius mission and SPURS in-situ salinity datasets. Data validation and quality assessment efforts in support of the Aquarius project are also described. Particular emphasis is placed on new tools and services that are available with the recent release of the Aquarius v4.0 dataset release. These range from OPeNDAP and THREDDS data access services, to web-based visualization via LAS, to PO.DAAC's advanced L2 subsetting tool called HITIDE (High-level Tool for Interactive Data Extraction). Dataset discovery via the PO.DAAC web-portal, and user support services are also reviewed.